So Make Me Live
by Gimli's Pickaxe
Summary: Blinded, weakened, and crippled beyond all hope, Legolas is reduced to a shadow of his former self. 'So make me live. For I think I have forgotten how.' AU, Oneshot.


_Life is beautiful. Life is good. Life is – a gift, a gift from above, a gift from Eru Iluvatar himself. Or so they say. But is it really? For I live, and they say that I will survive, that I am out of all danger now. But only now I learn – that sometimes, death may be the kinder of the two._

* * *

I open my eyes.

It does not make a big difference, really. It is dark, and I see nothing, feel nothing, only a suffocating, formless darkness. I close my eyes. I open them. I feel no difference but for the sudden feeling of cool air upon my unseeing eyes.

Yes. I am blind.

And crippled in so many other ways, too. It is almost humorous, this. I imagine the orcs pulling my limp body this way and that, pushing and pulling and stretching it to the limit, seeing how it twists and turns. Gruesome, but also funny, in some strange, gory way.

They found us.

To be more correct, they found me, and four unseeing, lifeless bodies. I was the best off of the five – but not very well off, either. I would never walk again. I would never breathe as freely as I had before. I would never see again. I had been a bloody, crippled heap, so hideously deformed that they almost mistook me for another corpse.

I was foolish, young, and headstrong.

The best archer the Greenwood had ever seen, they called me. And they were not wrong. My aim was true and straight, and my arrows flew so fast that one almost blended into another. I was skilled, but I was also headstrong, and ambitious, and proud.

And so I did not listen. I did not listen when they said that I was still too green to go hunting orc. I had taken four of my closest friends, and gone out on some self-appointed intelligence mission towards the southern reaches of the forest.

We were good, but sometimes good is not enough, I'd learned.

Well, so I am alive.

The headstrong young prince, skilled and youthful and full of joy - dead. No longer strong, no longer sprightly, no longer proud nor vain. No longer a warrior.

I was the warrior-prince of Eryn Galen, pride of our people.

I am that no longer.

So what am I now? A shadow of my former self? Is that what I have become?

It is so funny that I almost laugh. It is a bitter, unseemly sound, but I do not care anymore. I have nothing to be vain of, after all.

I am alive. But perhaps I am being punished now, being punished by the Valar. Being punished for the four innocent young lives my pride has cost. See, they have already taken that damned pride from me and filled me chock-full of bitterness.

I do not know whether to laugh or to weep.

* * *

My father King comes to visit me some days later. His crown of berries must be as red as ever, for they feel smooth to the touch and just hard enough. But I do not see. I shall never see that color red again.

Will I ever forget it? Will I ever forget, until all of my memories are coloured in this strange, dour shade of grey, the edges blending into each other until all that is left is sound and sensation?

Mayhap. I do not know. I do not know if I want to know.

"You are still as fair as ever, my son."

There is a strange note in his voice, something I have never heard in him before. It takes a long, long while before I identify it. This note, so out-of-place in the powerful voice of a King. It is that hint of weakness, of defeat.

"Then I am glad." I answer, my voice even and low and hoarse, and there is a long bout of silence. When he speaks again, his voice is composed once more.

"You still have much to give to our people."

Do I?

I had thought to be a beacon of hope, that shining golden figure of a prince, battling orcs and other foul creatures, keeping our forest safe. Back straight and tall, posture erect and confident, someone everyone could look up to.

I am crippled now.

I have gotten used to my new body, somewhat, but I still have to be wheeled around on a chair everywhere I go. Oh, I walk, but it is a piteous hobble that barely gets me across the room. So on my chair I go.

Who will look up to me now?

Most Elves have to look down to talk to me anyway.

"You still have much to give," he says, again, as if trying to convince me of that truth. A strain of determination colouring his voice.

I do not know. I feel empty, so empty, that I cannot tell anything on my own anymore.

I nod.

* * *

They are still looking for something for me to do.

I am blind, so I cannot read. I am too weak to hold a quill for any long period of time. Therefore, I shall not be a scribe.

I am chair-bound, unable to walk any long distance on my own, nevermind carry messages over long stretches of wilderness. So I shall not be a messenger either.

I cannot read the posture, the body-languages of the many members of the council. My hearing is no longer as sharp as it once was. I shall never be a counselor, either.

They have run out of jobs.

I am blind, yes, but I am also an elf, and I feel the fleeting brushes of others' minds like sharp arrows, those touches of condolences and lingering sorriness that make me want to retch. So I take my wheeled chair, and get a servant to roll it all the way out of the palace. He is sorry enough for me that he complies.

The air is fresh against my face. All of a sudden, I am surrounded by the impulse to run away, to go, as far as I can, as far as I dare, and before I know it I am entering a village not far from the palace.

I am taken by surprise when a sobbing elleth throws herself at me, clawing at my already unseeing eyes, crying out curses and other, unintelligable words.

I am too weak to fight back. But I do not want to, either.

I recognize a name from her rantings, and she calls out for her son, her son who will never come back. Oh. This is the mother of my dear friend, that friend who even now rests in the embrace of Mandos.

The friend – I killed.

Oh, how proud I was.

How young, how willful, how headstrong.

How foolish.

I become just a little bit number. Broken, that is what I am. Broken.

Perhaps that friend is really quite better off than me.

* * *

That night – the dreams come.

My friends – I see them. I see them so well, as clearly as I had before I had become as I am now. But they are the crippled ones now, hideously deformed as no elf ever could be, clawing and ripping and crying out at me.

You did this to us, they cry. You did this to us.

You will pay. You will pay.

I wake with a gasp. A cool night breeze caresses my sweaty face, and a now-familiar darkness surrounds me. The images of my friends, crippled, are seared as if with white-hot fire behind my eyelids.

I actually never saw their dead bodies. When I had waken, they had found me, and they had been dead. And I was never to see in my long, long life again. Funny, is it not?

I do not know what comes over me.

But I move with the strength of one posessed, dragging my uncompromising body across the hard floor of my room and aross the corridor, than out of the palace, all the way into the training grounds.

I bang around, making an infernal racket, graceful no more. I am sweating all over and trembling like a leaf in a gale, but I make it.

I manage to pick up one of the training bows, but I cannot hold it. It feels like molten lead in my hands. Heavy. So heavy.

Ai, I am weak. I am weak.

I had never known just how much.

How had I ever even used one of these? That Legolas – that young prince seems so far away now. As if through a thick mist, as if in a dream.

We are two different souls now.

I ought to feel lost, cheated, angry at the orcs who have done this to me, angry at myself for having been so vain and foolish as to take to the south on my own.

But I do not. I am numb. I am numb.

How should I feel?

A rustle of cloth, silk against silk, and I know that I am not alone.

That is all the warning that I get before I am tackled to the ground by a lithe, hard body, whispering harshly, hoarsely, hands vice-like around my neck.

"This is not my son! My son is dead! Dead!"

I cannot fight back.

I do not want to. But I cannot, also.

If I let go now – will I find peace at last? I do not think so. I am forgetting what peace feels like. I am forgetting how anything felt like.

My head begins to spin, and my body releases a hoarse cough, rattling my weakened ribs. The figure lets me go, in a strange, jerky motion, as if horrified by what he had just tried to do.

"Legolas. My Greenleaf."

My father whispers, and when I hear it I know deep inside that he has been broken too.

He has seen how broken I have become, how weak, how – how different, and It has broken him.

So we are broken together. Two shards of a shattered mirror.

Father and son. Twisted. Crippled.

The old Legolas is dead. But now, I think, the old Elvenking is also.

He rocks me in his arms, mumbling incoherent nothings, weeping as I have never seen him weep before, and so we stay, long into the night.

Oh, my sweet, sweet father. So strong, so tall and straight and proud.

Strong no more.

"Live, Legolas, live, live for me" I catch, thrown in amongst his mutterings.

Live. Such a strange word.

It can be so beautiful, so vivid, so full of life and sparkling, but it can also be numb, freezing cold, so dark, suffocating.

Oh, father. Adar nin.

So make me live.

For I think I have forgotten how.

* * *

**A/N :** Depressing, yes. :( I think Legolas must probably hate me by now for the things I make him go through...

You have my thanks for bearing with me and reading all the way through this piece, certainly - and all reviews will be read through thoroughly and cherished. Which is another way of saying - please, review! Yes, I am shameless. :D I beg for reviews... :)


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